Aktuelle Version vom 24. Januar 2013, 03:14 Uhr

> - Could you introduce the Digital Vienna scene for us, please in a few
> sentences

There are many, many initivatives and people here in Vienna that are part
of the digital scene. ubermorgen (ubermorgen.com) are currently propagating
their fastinating concept 'Google will eat itself', Sonance (sonance.net)
is a wonderful digital platform, Team Teichenbeg (teichenberg.at) are
working in the field of open source audio streaming software and e-
learning, Metalab (metalab.at) is a newly founded place for digital and
analog hacking, Quintessenz (quintessenz.org) organise the Linux Weeks
Vienna and the Big Brother Award, 5upernet (5uper.net) persent digital
hi/lo art, EQUALEYES (www.equaleyes.org) Vienna's united VJs and
Visualists, and of course monochrom (monochrom.at/english), the group I'm
part of, is currently dealing with free culture/anti-copyright projects,
nerd theatre and a long-term political computer game project called 'Soviet
Unterzoegersdorf'.
But there are so many people working in the field, it's nearly impossible
to present a full picture of the digital scene in Vienna.

> - What was the main idea behind the foundation of NetzNetz?

netznetz.net is a Vienna/Austria-based 'meta-community' which consists of
all kinds of digital initiatives, net artists and technicians who are
associated with the term 'net culture'. Under the title netznetz.net a
congregation of initiatives and individuals in the "greater electronic
area" of Vienna is growing with the goal to enhance and also visualize
connectivity between themselves and the public.
In a 3-day convention at the Künstlerhaus in October 2004 netznetz.net
activists sounded out the practices, collaborations and futures of digital
Vienna. The motto "bring your own devices" was a call beyond the individual
scenes to both past and future participants, and offered access to new
techniques and strategies in horizontal working situations.

> - Could you share the process of convincing the city government to
provide this reasonable grant for local digital workshops?

It all started with the frequently announced 'crisis of net culture' in
Vienna. The well established institutions of the scene were cutting their
services and activities, while many activists of the field had been relying
on other means of income as a resource for their work for years, anyway.
New forms of collaboration and presentation were emerging. Coordinating
resources via a simple mailing list, the quickly growing netznetz-movement
launched its first project in 2004 with the 'netznetz Festival of Net
Culture', bringing together members of the open source community, net
artists, people of the cultural sector, technicians and the audience in
Vienna's Künstlerhaus. Further projects evolved, the so-called 'redraft of
net culture funding' being one of them.
Now for first time ever, a local government has agreed to support a local
net community to decide over the distribution of its own funding. The new
funding system strives for guaranteed and dispersed distribution of funding
in the sector while the parameters of the distribution are meant to remain
flexible, providing a dynamic scope. The aim is to encourage project-based
collaborations by distributing various smaller grants. Therefore, everybody
who is involved in the sector is subject to the principle of permanent
reconfiguration of the system and the network.

Tired of waiting for net art's signal to register on the radar of
established arts funders, we at netznetz have taken matters into our own
hands. We convinced our local arts commission that software art should be
funded the way it's made: through self-organized networks of distributed
activity and collaborative effort. More than 100 net art groups will join
forces in developing 'social software' that will channel available funding
in a 'guaranteed and dispersed' way within 'elastic' parameters -- a
continuous project altered daily.
As rhizome.org called it in autumn 2005: "The FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source
Software) principles behind the current upswing of social software
development propose that sharing is the most politically relevant and
efficient way to do anything. Netznetz extends those principles to the
thing most free software innovators are wary of sharing: money. The blog
world was buzzing!"

> - How does Mana work? (Procedure, democracy, rules)

50% of the funding (250,000 Euro, roughly US$300,000) is reserved for
infrastructure (backbone projects), newbies (microgrants), and common
representation (annual convention) and is to be distributed by the
administration together with the community during the course of processes
like open space conferences. The other half of the funding is to be self-
distributed among the community in the form of the 'MANA network grants',
facilitating the everyday work of contributors, which is usually not
supported at all in conventional arts endowment systems.
So MANA is a system for the distribution of municipal grants developed and
run by netznetz in which the participants distribute their own funding
according to certain democratically agreed-upon rules and aided by custom
software. It is run largely autonomous of the city government which
provides the funds.

To be fair: the process to come up with an ideal system of self-governance
amongst the net culture people and net artists has also been marked by
disagreements. Critics fear that the system could lead to increased
competition and hostilities between participants, favor well-marketed
projects over substantiated ones or that too much trust is placed in as-of-
yet unproven software. As one of the people inside the system, I think that
the idea is an autonomous, democratic, open and non-bureaucratic model, and
it is designed to reward collaboration.
Some critics call the system 'neo-liberal', but Richard Barbrook, one of
the key note speakers at the 'netznetz / Parliaments of Art' conference in
Vienna called it an open and democratic approach. And Richard Barbrook
really is one of the most radical critics of the neo-liberal cyber-elite.
In contrast, Barbrook thinks that the importance of the latest wave of
technological innovation lies precisely in its ability to challenge the
ideologies of the self-proclaimed opinion leaders. The net allows for the
emergence of spontaneous and flexible virtual communities, defining
themselves less by market exchange than by social convention.

In terms of money two distributing processes already happened. In March
2006 the community distributed the first part (50.000 euros) of the
'infrastructure grants'. The method we used was the 'MANA Peanuts'
alternative currency system) by A. Trawoeger. And in April 2006 the first
part (125.000 euros) of the 'MANA network grants' were distributed. The
method was the 'MANA Community Game' created by C. Theiler.

And currently we are working to smoothen the process, the incorporate the
critical statements and to improve the flow for the next distribution in
autumn.

> - This whole idea: Mana, NetzNetz, and the democratic way you share the
government's grant sounds fantastic. Was this whole idea a local
development, or there are other similar ways of gaining government support
elswhere in Europe?

Thanks, it really sounds fantastic, but it's hard community work and we do
our best. The parameters of the distribution are meant to remain flexible,
providing a dynamic scope. The aim is to encourage project-based
collaborations by distributing various smaller grants. Therefore, everybody
who is involved in the sector is subject to the principle of permanent
reconfiguration of the system and the network.
And it's just the beginning.